National board for DNB and DrNB
NBEMS: thesis format, and what only your department can tell you
DNB and DrNB is the one pathway in this register with a single national format and a calendar counted in days from the date you joined. Both are published, so both are stated here with the clause they come from.
- Body
- National board for DNB and DrNB
- Awards
- DNB, DrNB
- What this page has
- Format sourced · 10 sourced rows
The record
The record
Read in the body's own document
What is established, and where each line came from
Each line below was read in a document this body published, and the document is named beneath it. Check it rather than trusting us.
Everything in this section is read from the board's own published thesis guidelines[2], which is why it can be stated in days and page counts rather than in questions.
Start with who holds what. The guidelines have you registered with NBEMS rather than with a university: your registration letter is an NBEMS one and travels bound into the thesis, your accredited hospital's ethics committee approves the protocol and forwards it, and NBEMS assesses the thesis itself and accepts or returns it. That is why this is the one body in this register whose rules we can state end to end — they are national, set out in one published document, and the same at every accredited hospital.
Source: NBEMS Guidelines for Thesis Protocol & Thesis Submission
The protocol is written to word limits, and they are tight. Title 120 characters including spaces. Structured synopsis 250 to 300 words. Introduction 300 to 500. Review of literature 800 to 1,000. Aim and objectives up to 200. Material and methods 1,200 to 1,600. Ten to twenty-five references in ICMJE style. Ethics committee approval must precede the research, and the accredited hospital evaluates and approves the protocol through its own institutional ethics committee before it goes to NBEMS on the Thesis Protocol Approval annexure.
The protocol calendar runs from your date of joining, not from any academic year. For a three-year broad-specialty or super-specialty DNB or DrNB the protocol is due by 180 days from joining and the research study commences on the 181st day. For a two-year post-diploma DNB it is 90 days and the 91st day. A trainee who misses it is not eligible for the final theory examination they would first have appeared in, and cannot submit a thesis at all without the protocol submission acknowledgement number.
The submission calendar runs from the same date. For a three-year course the research is to be complete by 24 months from joining, the thesis is submitted for assessment by 26 months, and a late window runs to 27 months on payment of a late fee of ten thousand rupees. For a two-year post-diploma course it is 15 months and 16 months. Miss it and you cannot fill the theory examination form, because that form needs the thesis submission acknowledgement number.
Eighty pages is the ceiling and it includes everything — text, figures, references, annexures and certificates. Printed on both sides, every page numbered, no page left blank. Typed at 1.5 spacing in Times New Roman, Arial or Garamond at 12 point, with 1 inch margins on all four sides. Each major section starts on a new page. The case record form, informed consent form and patient information sheet may be single-spaced.
Inside those eighty pages the guidelines allocate the space for you: introduction restricted to 2 pages, review of literature to 10 to 12 pages, discussion to 8 to 10 pages. Illustrative material is restricted and printed on the paper rather than pasted in. Techniques are not described at length unless you modified them. Statistical methods are described for each objective, naming the program used. Data collection is expected to take around 6 to 12 months, and the case load is to be judged against hospital records before the topic is settled.
What travels with the bound thesis: the signed and stamped printout of the online application, the synopsis, a copy of your NBEMS registration letter, the Thesis Protocol Approval and the publication annexure, plus a declaration that the work is bona fide and your own, signed by you, your guide and the head of the institution. Without that declaration the thesis is not considered. Assessment fees are published — three thousand five hundred rupees plus eighteen per cent GST for a fresh thesis, one thousand eight hundred plus the same GST for a modified one — and applications are accepted online only.
Source: NBEMS guidelines, thesis assessment fee and submission
If the assessor asks for changes, the modified thesis is due within 6 weeks of that communication. It is hard bound, labelled MODIFIED THESIS on the standard cover, accompanied by a summary of the thesis and of the modifications made, with the changes flagged in the text and a certificate signed by you, your guide and the head of institution stating that the assessor's suggestions were followed. Until the thesis is accepted you cannot sit the next theory or practical examination, and NBEMS does not answer status queries until four months after submission.
Source: NBEMS guidelines, modified thesis and information for candidates
The institutional ethics committee that approves your protocol has its own requirements: multidisciplinary and multi-sectoral, preferably eight to fifteen members with preferably half of them non-affiliated or from outside the institution, a quorum of five, and registration with the National Ethics Committee Registry for Biomedical and Health Research. If your hospital has no registered committee it may use a nearby institution's under a memorandum of understanding. This is worth checking in your first month, because it gates the protocol and the protocol gates everything else.
Source: NBEMS guidelines, constitution of Institutional Ethics Committee
Now the trap, and it is a real one. Two thesis documents are served on the board's own site and they do not agree. The older file, linked below, is titled Guidelines for Thesis Writing & Submission, is branded NBE rather than NBEMS, and sets the deadline as a calendar cut-off — 30 June for the December final theory examination, 31 December for the June one — with the fresh assessment fee at three thousand five hundred rupees and no late fee at all. The current document, which every figure on this page is taken from, replaces that with months counted from your own date of joining, adds the ten thousand rupee late window, adds GST to the fee, and states that its timelines apply with immediate effect to all admission sessions. Both are one search away from each other. Work from the NBEMS-branded document, and check on the site that it is still the latest before you print eighty pages to it.
Source: the superseded NBE-era writing guidelines — read, then set aside
Our own reading · not a citation
And confirm the money rather than trusting this page for it. Fees and late fees are revised, and the figures above are the ones in the document as we read it on 11 September 2026.
What we read, and when
Read in full on 10 September 2026 and re-checked against the document on 11 September 2026: the NBEMS Guidelines for Thesis Protocol & Thesis Submission, 23 pages, on natboard.edu.in. Every figure on this page is taken from that document. The older Guidelines for Thesis Writing & Submission, still served on the same site, was also read and is cited once only — to warn that it contradicts the current document on the deadline and the fee.
A figure that is not on this page is not a figure we are withholding. It is one we could not read in a published document, and printing it anyway would cost you a reprint at best. How this register is built.
The floor
The floor
Regardless of the template
What applies whatever your format says
Four instruments decide the substance of a postgraduate thesis in India. A local format decides how it is typed.
The Post Graduate Medical Education Regulations, 2023[1] govern the MD, MS, DM and MCh postgraduate examined by a university. Your thesis requirement does not come from there; it comes from the board itself, which is why § I above could state it so precisely. What follows applies to you anyway, because it is about the research rather than about who examines it.
Ethics comes before everything, including the format. Institutional Ethics Committee approval must precede any data collection under the national ethical guidelines[5], informed consent is mandatory, and a prospective interventional study is registered with the Clinical Trials Registry of India. No amount of reformatting repairs a dataset collected before approval was granted, which is why this is the first date to fix and never the last.
On similarity, the board names plagiarism and the distortion of the research process as serious matters and puts the primary responsibility on the guide, without fixing a percentage. Where no threshold is published for you, we work to the stricter convention the universities apply — similarity under 10% under the 2018 academic integrity regulations[3] — and a word-level MDSoftune report travels with every draft so there is nothing left to discover at the end.
And authorship does not vary at all. You satisfy the ICMJE criteria[4] and we do not. Mentoring, editing, statistics and compliance review belong in your acknowledgements; our name appears nowhere in your author line. That holds at every body in this register.
The checklist
The checklist
Ask, do not assume
What to confirm with your own department
Take this list to your guide or the postgraduate section and come away with written answers. Every item on it changes the document you produce.
Confirm before you write the methods chapter
7 items
That the NBEMS guidelines document you are working from is the current one on natboard.edu.in, since the timelines and fees are revised from time to time.
Your exact date of joining as NBEMS holds it, because every deadline is counted from that date and not from an academic year.
Whether your hospital's institutional ethics committee is registered with the national registry, and if not, which institution's committee it uses.
Your thesis protocol submission acknowledgement number, and that your hospital has actually forwarded the protocol.
The current thesis assessment fee and late fee, and the mode of payment accepted.
Whether your specialty has any additional requirement set by your accredited hospital on top of the NBEMS format.
Which similarity-checking tool your hospital uses and what figure it treats as acceptable, since NBEMS names plagiarism as a serious matter without fixing a percentage.
Ask for these by name
The current Guidelines for Thesis Protocol and Thesis Submission from natboard.edu.in, downloaded yourself rather than forwarded.
Your Thesis Protocol Approval as submitted, and the acknowledgement number it generated.
Your hospital's ethics committee registration number.
Why written answers
A format passed on verbally between batches drifts. The margin survives and the page cap does not, or a certificate that was added last year never reaches you. Ask for the document, note its number and its date, and keep it. If your department cannot produce one, that is itself the answer, and the thing to do is get the current circular from the university rather than copy a senior's thesis.
Our part
Our part
How MDThesis works with this
We format to the document you bring
Your department signs your submission, so your department's copy of the format is the one we build to.
On the first call we ask for two things: the current format document for NBEMS, and a title page your own department has already approved. The draft is set to those from the first chapter rather than reformatted at the end, which is when a page cap becomes expensive. Where the two disagree, your department's copy wins. Where your university is stricter than any convention, the stricter rule is the one we follow.
The checklist above is not homework we have set you. Your mentor goes through it with you and the answers become dated rows on your record, with the deadlines counted from the dates your own body uses. An MDSoftune word-level uniqueness report ships with every draft version, so similarity is visible while a chapter is still in draft rather than at submission. We do not operate the checker your institution runs and cannot predict the figure it will produce.
What we do not do: write your thesis, promise a grade or an approval, or put our name anywhere in it. You are the author. How the work is actually divided.
Non-affiliation statement
MDThesis works to these published standards. It is not affiliated with, approved by, accredited by or endorsed by any of the bodies that issue them, nor by any university. Naming National Board of Examinations in Medical Sciences, New Delhi on this page means we have read or looked for its published thesis rules. It does not mean the body has reviewed, approved or endorsed this page or this practice.
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Document: NBEMS thesis format · Revision 2 · Last reviewed
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